Book Review: I am Evelyn Amony: Reclaiming My Life from the Lord’s Resistance Army by Evelyn Amony

Abstract

More than 60,000 children were abducted in east and central Africa in the 1990s by the violent rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army and its notorious commander Joseph Kony. Evelyn Amony was one of them. I Am Evelyn Amony tells a harrowing story of heartbreaking loss, unrelenting horror, and courageous survival. Abducted in 1994 at the age of eleven, Amony spent nearly eleven years inside the Lord’s Resistance Army, becoming a forced wife to Joseph Kony and mother to his children. She takes the reader into the inner circles of LRA commanders and reveals unprecedented personal and domestic details about Joseph Kony. Her account unflinchingly conveys the moral difficulties of choosing survival in a situation fraught with violence, threat, and death. Amony was freed in 2005 following her capture by the Ugandan military. Despite the trauma she endured with the LRA, Amony joined a Ugandan peace delegation to the LRA in 2006, trying to convince Kony to end the war that had lasted more than two decades. She recounts those experiences, as well as the stigma she and her children faced when she returned home as an adult. This extraordinary testimony shatters stereotypes of war-affected women, revealing the complex ways that Amony navigated life inside the LRA and her current work as a human rights advocate to make a better life for her children and other women affected by war.